While I welcome the disclosure, the fact that the US government has now officially stated that they are not hiding evidence of alien contact is not likely to change any minds.

The Obama White House has created a website called We the People in which anyone can write a petition for information from the administration. The current rules state that a petition has to achieve 150 signatures within 30 days to appear on the publicly searchable database, and then must reach 25,000 signatures within 30 days in order to trigger a response from the administration. This second threshold was just increased from 5,000. The two UFO petitions combined garnered 17,000 signatures, but I guess it beat the increase to the higher threshold.

UFO conspiracy theorists have been claiming for years that the US government has been hiding extensive knowledge of contact with aliens. The alleged crashed saucer at Roswell New Mexico is just one famous example. The conspiracy claims include the claim that the government maintains a secret facility, Area 51, in which they examine recovered alien craft, and that they are attempting (and perhaps even succeeded) to reverse engineer alien technology. Many claim that a shadow organization exists within the government, or perhaps is even transnational, such as the Men in Black, who swoop in and suppress any hard evidence of aliens when encounters occur. Some also claim that the government is in contact with aliens and is collaborating with them.

Over the years there have been many freedom of information (FOI) requests for government documents concerning UFOs and aliens. None of the disclosed material has ever contained evidence of spacecraft or aliens. But they often contain redacted material that further fuels conspiracy theories.

There is no credible evidence that aliens are visiting the earth, or that the US government, or any other government, has any contact or knowledge of their existence. The recent disclosure by the Obama White House is consistent with that conclusion. They write:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.

The statement is unlikely to change the mind of any conspiracy theorist or UFO believer. The obvious reason is because – if you believe in a conspiracy, then of course the conspirators will not simply admit to their involvement and to the existence of a conspiracy. That is the core problem with conspiracy thinking; it quickly becomes a closed belief system. The conspiracy theorist can always claim that any lack of evidence for the conspiracy was, of course, hidden and suppressed by the conspirators. Any evidence for an alternate explanation was planted by the conspirators. Therefore there is no evidence, or lack of evidence, that can be brought to bear against the conspiracy theory. It is immunized from refutation, immune to evidence, and completely sealed-off. There is therefore no way out of the conspiracy, once you have fully bought into it (except to recognize what I just explained).

There is therefore little doubt that UFO conspiracy theorists will shrug off this statement from the Obama Administration with little difficulty.

In all seriousness, I think that this petition demonstrates just exactly how irrational these UFO-conspiracy people are. IF you accept their argument that there is a UFO cover-up, one that has been the focus of a spectacularly thorough effort at concealment, then what exactly is a petition going accomplish? Will their Men in Black really give up on more than half a century of evasion and let it all out just because of a PR stunt? Not under any rational or logical framework.

I think that even if the government DID confirm something, these people would see it as a deliberate campaign of mis-information, part of an even grander cover-up to conceal an even more outrageous “truth.”

If the U.S. government can’t cover up the MKULTRA experiments or the Abu Ghraib incidents, how could they possible get away with a fake moon landing or UFOs?

Call me paranoid, but with the very real threat and inevitability of another major asteroid collision that would, at worse, destroy all of mankind and at best severely inconvenience us…the only reason that the government wouldn’t make finding an effective intervention for that scenario priority 1, is if they have the threat covered with some unknown alien technology.

Seriousness aside, I have no idea what these UFO cranks hope to accomplish. Even if they were right, do they honestly expect the administration to come out and say “ok, you guy’s got us. We just want to get everything into the open and get you people off our backs!” It’s as if these petition stunts are nothing more than mental masturbation for these guys that just love to hear people in power acknowledge that they even exist.

Joking aside, seriously……someone really needs to get on that asteroid problem.

“Call me paranoid, but with the very real threat and inevitability of another major asteroid collision that would, at worse, destroy all of mankind and at best severely inconvenience us…the only reason that the government wouldn’t make finding an effective intervention for that scenario priority 1, is if they have the threat covered with some unknown alien technology. ”

My belief is they would release it but it would become like global warming. Let’s say the asteroid is 20 years out. Or 2 elections out. It requires massive $$$ right now to deal with but the benefits won’t be realized until there’s a new administration or the 70 year olds running major corporations will have long died. There’s a well oiled denial machine out there ready with an effective playbook. Cranks and deniers would simply deny the data, call astronomers astrofacists, label it junk science, urge we teach the controversy, etc.

Yeah, there was an Onion article that simply said “House republicans vow to veto Obama’s plan to stop giant asteroid heading towards earth” or something like that. Maybe that is why the idea came to me, but it’s a serious question. You hear plenty about manned vs. non-manned missions to mars but not a peep anymore about what we do if a planet killer shows up unexpectedly. I suppose we are getting way off topic here, so I’ll digress on the subject.

I really never understood why such a conspiracy would exist in the first place. I’ve never heard a reasonable answer to the question of why the world’s governments (which ever are involved in the coverup) have an interest in keeping such information a secret. The whole widespread panic argument seems unfounded, especially if the truth was that aliens have been visiting for decades. My understanding is that the reports of panic “war of the worlds” broadcast in the 1930s was at least partially attributed to media exaggeration, and in that senario it was not just that aliens existed, but they were attacking.

“Any evidence for an alternate explanation was planted by the conspirators.”

I think my favorite piece of “evidence” that has an obvious alternate explanation is that UFO sightings seem to cluster around military bases, obviously because the aliens are assessing our technologies, or because we’re flying captured/ reverse-engineered alien crafts stored at the bases.

You would think that at the least, this clustering evidence would be regarded as a null considering that we can say with certainty that strange aircraft WILL be seen at military bases.

I could also never explain how my naivete ruled out the more prosaic explanation, but several of my UFO believer friends indicated that the two were related.

The mundane truth about the US is probably the same as that in the UK. Yes, the government did cover up UFO reports. No, there is no definite evidence of aliens. Governments just love covering stuff up!

The UK government has now released large tranches of UFO reports from their “secret” UFO section of the ministry of defence (a couple of clerks who worked on a part time basis filing the reports away). See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos/

Most of the reports are totally cranky but there are several that are puzzling. The most interesting is the Rendlesham Forest report but although there is a mass of eyewitness testimony, especially from the security forces at the nearby US nuclear base, there is no material evidence.

I am pretty sure that there is no material evidence in the US either – just think what a bit of alien spacecraft, if such things existed, would be worth.

US Government says lots of stuff. US Government says that money is worth something even though the gold standard is no more. And the US Government is printing money faster than they know what to do with, or can pay for. Nickels and dimes aren’t even worth the metal they’re molded out of.

The UFOS have gotten to a Christian music radio station in Boston, WGIH. They just started playing something that sounded like bloody close encounters of the third kind. How much more proof do you want? What I want to know is why are they going after a Christian station? Why not a hindu or an atheist station? Because the government got involved. Thats why.

And another thing. Call me insane, but ET was more than just chickenwire and clay. He was setting us up so we’d just laugh at aliens and say gee, that’s funny. You don’t think so. But they got spielberg, and I can prove it.

“The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.” – You of course believe this!

I am not a conspiracy theorist nor I read about the latest conspiracies, but what seems interesting to me is that any form of government skepticism (generally speaking) is somehow automatically labeled as “conspiracy theory”. It seems that the word skepticism has been euphemized as conspiracy whenever it is use to criticize governments. I haven’t heard of a well-respected scientist addressing a conspiracy theory with a tendency somewhat similar to how an atheist would address the benevolence of the idea of god.

I don’t believe in these ET. conspiracies but can some well-known scientist attack the stupidity of how government respond to ET conspiracies and religious beliefs? That is something I want to see! Politicians laugh whenever confronted with questions about UFOS, but whenever it comes to this “god” shit nobody really says anything.